Recently an enormous amount of hypermedia information combining text, images and sounds is accessible via the Internet on the World Wide Web, mainly due to the widespread use of personal computers and the universal access of millions of users to the World Wide Web. Given the amount of information now readily available on the Internet, having the ability to access the Internet becomes a matter of convenience as well as a matter of having access to an invaluable information source.
While the growth of the Internet as a global medium for communications and commerce has been driven, in part, by the increased availability of personal computers, the access to the Internet over a personal computer is limited because the user must have access to a computer equipped with the adequate software, a working Internet connection, and is expected to have a certain level of computer expertise before successfully accessing, or browsing, the wide range of available information. If the user does not have the necessary hardware and the appropriate software to direct the computer to establish a connection to Internet via a modem or a direct connection, the user would then have no other means available for accessing the Internet. While wireless access to the Internet over cellular telephones or other handheld devices has the potential to resolve the mobility and connectivity issues resulting from Internet access over personal computers, the displays of these devices are small and the ability to input information using portable or virtual keyboards is constrained, limiting the usability and convenience of such approaches. Therefore, the goal of anytime and anywhere access to a wide variety of information and services on the Internet is not yet fully realized.
In a parallel direction, a vast array of telephony based technologies, like answering machines, voice mail, automated call dispatching, forwarding services, Interactive Voice Response (IVR), and the Voice Web have been deployed to increase the utility of telephones. Each of these devices or services intends to increase the usefulness of the telephone in a specific way.
IVR systems can include automated processing systems capable of carrying out operations in response to the human voice or dual tone multi-frequency (DTMF) tones, also known as touch tones, throughout a telephone network. IVRs using DTMF computer menu systems or voice-recognition engines are commonly used to help in responding to telephone inquiries without requiring any human operator. Most people are familiar with automated telephone services provided by IVR systems. For example, these services allow users to retrieve information like bank balances, flight schedules, and movie show times from any telephone. IVR systems give access to information and services through a simple touch-tone telephone to customers 24-hours a day, 7-days a week. Another example of IVRs consists in voice-activated dialers which respond to user speaking names of persons to be called, by automatically dialing the appropriate telephone numbers.
The explosive growth of Internet and World Wide Web technologies, combined with the availability of IVR systems, has shifted the landscape for providers of traditional phone services to a new set of customers accessing information and services through the Web. While in most cases customers still access automated services through the phone, providers are finding it easier to build new services that exploit the power of Web technology. Consequently, rapid progress is being made in the development of a “voice web”. The voice web intends to be analogous to (and possibly integrated with) the well-known World Wide Web. However, the information maintained on the voice web will be primarily in audible form, and users can access them using speech commands and/or DTMF tones.
Even if the public's enthusiasm for new computer-based multimedia services has been seen by many analysts as a threat to the conventional forms of hard-copied publishing, particularly book publishing, reading a printed publication cannot be compared with reading an electronic media. Reading manuals and reports at work, textbooks at school, and menus at restaurants, and more generally reading printed material at any time and in any place is part of our daily life. People can browse very easily through paper catalogs, magazines, newspapers, maps and books by flipping through the pages and by “glancing” at pictures and text. It is also very easy for them to mark and return to specific parts of a physical document. When comparing paper based information with computer based information, paper has a number of useful properties that computers cannot provide, such as,                paper is portable, familiar and can be easily distributed;        paper is easy to read, browse, mark, and manipulate.        
Hence, even if electronic media presents the advantage of being easily updated, electronic media does not replace paper for most people, whether they are familiar with computers or not, and nothing leads one to foresee a general and massive replacement of paper books by electronic books in a near future.
Therefore, printed data and electronic data have to be considered as being more complementary than equivalent and thus, must be adequately combined. For example, digital information can be accessed for completing printed documents so as to enhance traditional printed products with access to digitally stored information. The use of telephony and voice response systems to access and retrieve from the Web information related with a printed publication simplifies such access to complementary information, allowing an anywhere and anytime access.